It is all too easy to generalize the “Nerd” personality, but there is in fact incredible individuality across the board at Big Nerd Ranch. We have former physicists, civil engineers, nuclear submarine officers, gaming experts, opera singers, marathon runners and beer brewers on our team.

I get a kick out of stepping back and watching the hum of these brilliant minds working together to solve the world’s problems. But whenever we have to get work done, we put our headphones on and zone out. We go into our happy place where the rest of the room fades away and we are productive like well-oiled machines.

I’m a front-end developer, which means I write HTML, CSS and JavaScript code all day. But I also frequently work with back-end developers on projects, and I often contribute front-end code and assets to web apps built with the Ruby on Rails MVC framework.